Steal a Carcass for You
by Darknightdestiny
Summary: [Hellmasker x Tifa] Curiousity turns into infatuation, infatuation requires selfcontrol, and suppression breeds a violent obsession. The beast is unleashed. Thirty darkfics for Archica's '30Screams' Livejournal community.
1. A Bloody Knife

**Theme 01**

_A Bloody Knife_**  
**

**(-warnings: violence and _attempted_ sexual assault-)**

†

The still, warm breeze did nothing to curb the heat prickling at her back as she slumped against the side of Cid and Shera's old farmhouse. Her lungs ached, her legs burned, and her knees felt like gelatin. She slid to the ground, long grass tickling the sweaty backs of her knees as she panted for breath. She could feel the heat in her face, could feel the damp hair sticking to her back and her neck, and she had been feeling an involuntary sway in her stance for several minutes. She would pass out soon from exhaustion if she couldn't find rest. But she had to keep running...she had to keep on...

The wind was slow and steady, the yard silent as a thief as she waited, heart racing in her chest. The green-hued sky cast a shadow over the abandoned plains, like doom slowly creeping over a sleeping child. Suddenly a rustling was heard and it spread over the wheat fields like a living breath from above, tossing the shafts to and fro as the dust flew through the air. She coughed as she felt a sudden rush of cold, and the rain moved over the countryside in waves, finally reaching the wall she leaned against.

She stood, rising above the dust as hardened chunks of ice pelted her face and limbs, turning her knuckles bloody as she held them in front of her, poised and ready to go. She backed against the planks and peered around the corner, over her left shoulder, hoping to find a clear path to follow. He was nowhere to be found, and the view was getting hazy; she could barely make out anything past the picket fence in the front yard.

She didn't really want to lose him; she wanted to keep him as close as possible, without actually being caught. The safest thing would have been to lead him out into the fields and keep running until he wore himself out and had to change back. But she knew that was impossible; she would never outlast him no matter the circumstances. He was relentless with an insatiable drive for murder, and surprisingly fast. She'd never seen him need to chase anything down before; somehow, she had expected him to be much slower.

The others had tried to stall him while she got away; she wanted to fight alongside them, wanted to make sure no one really hurt him. But while she didn't know what kind of wrath he might inflict on them, they were all the more worried about her. For some reason, he hadn't been concerned with the people standing in his way. To him, they were more or less an obstacle in the way of his real prize, and he would dispose of them sans red carpet. What he really wanted...was her.

A high-pitched shriek to her right shocked her out of indecision, and she jerked around just in time to see the blood-spattered blade whirring to life and coming straight for her head. She stumbled back; he narrowly missed her, imbedding the sharp teeth in the side of the house, saw-dust flying everywhere. She stood there, stunned and unable to move for all of two seconds as he struggled with the wall, before she broke into a full run.

She heard the chainsaw freed from the house as she rounded the corner, feet pounding against the moist dirt and the long grass as she ran along the picket fence. She could feel the reverberations in the earth as he caught up to her; so quick it was, and yet it felt like forever. She fought the urge to simply shut her eyes tightly and wait for the end as he brandished the power tool to her right, and instead she leapt over the fence, snagging her shin on one of the planks and ripping it open as she fell forward into the backyard.

She felt the blade cut through the air behind her as he swung, just missing her again, and she heard him catch the fence. She rolled quickly from her landing spot as he came down again on the grass, spewing dirt up into the air. Scrambling to her feet, she ran on throbbing legs to the back door of the house, slamming into it and stumbling inside. She pivoted back on her foot as she skidded to a halt, and she saw him speeding toward the house; she threw all her weight against the door just as he crossed the threshold.

He was smashed against the doorpost, his arm crushed against his chest, and the heavy chainsaw fell from his limp wrist and clattered to the floor. She landed in a crumpled heap on the hard linoleum, winded from the impact. She struggled to right herself and backed into the kitchen, giving him space enough to skirt around the deathtrap spinning dangerously close to his ankle.

Her fists were raised and ready, but he was so much faster than she had anticipated. He barreled into her, heavy weight bringing her crashing down through Cid's kitchen table. She barely registered what had happened before she found herself curled up and gasping for air on a bed of broken wood. She rolled over to find her pursuer already recovered and looming above her. She tried to push herself up from the floor, but he reached out and grabbed one of her legs, and she felt a hundred tiny splinters chew their way through her skin one by one as he yanked her towards him and steeled his knee against her chest.

His right hand emerged from the remains of the furniture, bringing with it the bloody knife Shera had been using earlier that day. She'd been picking the meat from the bones of one of their hens, and she could only imagine how he might use it against her. Eyes went wide as she clawed at his leg, but he gathered her wrists into his left hand and pinned them above her.

His heavy weight pressed down on her body, the air leaving her lungs at the demand of his knee. She felt her ribs bruising as he pressed the cold steel to the vitals of her inner thigh, coaxing her legs open. His dark hair fell against her face, blocking out the lights above her - his hair was stringy and knotted and rough, and _nothing like Vincent _- and she was met head-on with gleaming-red hellfire raging at her through the twin holes in the mask, furious at her evasion, wide and wild with anticipation.

He breathed in deeply, a rasping, worn, wheezing sound in his throat - neck so easily crushable, ducking behind that shield of a face - as the air in the room filtered through the tiny holes in his mask. The only other sound was the chainsaw rattling against the doorway as she held her breath, the sound jarring her skull as she wondered what note it might ride as it chewed through her soft tissue, crooked teeth biting and tearing her to oblivion. She tried to focus, tried to hone her energy on thinking up an escape plan, but she kept falling into darker imaginations, picturing his face when he finally came to, stumbling around above her broken mess of a body, and her heart ached at the knowledge of what it would do to him.

This moved her to look at the demon hovering above her, who seemed to be looking at her with a certain twisted fascination, eyes narrowed in what she was sure was a maniacal grin behind that mask, glee that rode high on monstrous cheeks and elicited that frightening vermillion glint. Eyes grew wide in recognition of the flash of passive, caustic warning found there, a front to bait her, daring her to fight back, knowing that he had her. So quick to anger, but when the threat she held had dissipated, he was more than willing to have a little fun with her futile attempts to avoid what was coming to her.

There was something else there as well, something...all too familiar. Something that she would never have recognized, though she might have suspected, had she not seen it before. She could feel it clawing at the back of her mind...

Images of tender muscle and slick entrails littering Cid's kitchen floor, flesh misting and bone powdering the air as the blade dove down into her chest. Another sin, another loss of control, because that was all it was about really...control. No control, no control...helpless, the both of them, and he would rip at his hair and his clothes and there would be vomit on the floor...and then he would run and hate himself so much more than he ever had, and he would punish himself like he had never done before...

Hellmasker...it was him.

He had a hold on her, a hold on Vincent, and he was taking joy in the images he was slipping into her head, taking advantage of her weaknesses. He knew that even if she resigned herself to him, death wouldn't relieve her of her anguish as long as she feared for the gunslinger's sanity in the wake of her mutilation by his hands. The moment she passed from one world to the next would be the worst of her nightmares.

_He was the one in control._

If she'd been completely alone with him, she'd have fought, regardless of the knife, knowing he would kill her in any case when he was through. But as her skirt rode higher and he flipped the knife, fisting the handle and trailing a finger up the inside of her thigh as he knelt on her chest, she thought that maybe, if she let him, she could buy herself some time.

The blood pounded in her veins as she felt his rough and calloused fingertips trace the lace between her legs. She felt an awful pain deep in her throat, and her stomach churned at the insidious near-hesitance of his hand; he was toying with her. His weight was suffocating, drowning her beneath hard armor and thick padding, and blinded by his plastic visage, it was hard to imagine that hiding beneath it all was warm flesh and fragile bone.

But somewhere beneath the ringing in her ears and the jagged blade screeching at her from the floor, somewhere beneath his heavy breath of decay and the near-breaking ache arching through her body, there were faint shouts and curses from outside the window.

A commotion at the back door broke through her fishbowl world, and suddenly she could breathe again, the heavy weight lifted from her chest. There was a heavy thud as he was thrown back against the refrigerator, followed by several more crashes as the change jar fell to the floor, along with cereal boxes and bottles of juice. She sat up with her hand clutched to her chest and her legs folded tightly together as she watched him lunge toward her again, only to be stopped by Cid's lance, piercing through his shoulder and fastening him to the wall. The older man held him there as Cloud readied his materia, and a loud shout from the backyard grabbed her attention.

"Tifa!" Yuffie's frantic voice pierced through the noise, calling to her from her place inside the doorway where she guarded Shera. Tifa rose to her feet as the ninja girl waved her over, but she turned to give the men one last look before heading out the door.

He watched her still, even as Cid skewered him with his spear. He was transfixed, even as Cloud dragged him to the floor with a gravity spell. His eyes never left her, only trailed up and down her body and then pinned her eyes under their smoldering heat. He was giving her that look again, the look that said he would _eat her alive _if only he could, and she wondered if she could see his face, whether or not she would find Vincent's self-satisfied grin, knowing how close he had gotten.

†

_**AN: **There's twenty-nine more coming...Glad I finally got that out of my system. The link to my LiveJournal is in my profile, in case this made any of you curious. My user name is "night-chaos", and the community I am writing these drabbles for is '30screams'. The community offers two alternate themes to choose from; the chapter titles will be named according to the theme I have chosen._

_These drabbles aren't all related, but some of them might be in the same universe. Hellmasker will vary from drabble to drabble; sometimes he will appear in form, others he will take over Vincent's body; sometimes he will wear a mask, sometimes what is behind the mask will vary. I am also taking full advantage of his telekinetic abilities, and I will be using psychic elements in some of these fics, as per the 'Nightmare' attack. Sometimes Hellmasker will have a voice, and other times he will not be able to speak audibly._

_Thanks again to Bleuwyn, who encouraged me to run with this pairing (your gift-fic is coming soon), and to her and Motchi for beta-reading. I'm slowly returning to darkfic, and so far, the journey's pretty fun. _

_As always, reviews are appreciated._

_DnD_


	2. Trapped

**Theme 02**

_Trapped_

**(-No warnings; this one's appropriate for most-)**

†

_Happy Birthday, Vincent Valentine...and a Happy Friday the 13th to the rest of you_

Yes, Odin must have been guiding her hand. He must have been lending her strength as well, she realised, for nothing else could have convinced her that she had really brought that mountain of a man down with merely a bust of the late President ShinRa. She dropped the heavy boot-laden leg she was carrying unceremoniously on the hard dirt floor just outside the library, glaring at its owner. Why on earth couldn't she attract a stable man?

She'd be cleaning up broken glass and scattered tomes until early in the morning, when Vincent would no doubt guilt himself. Perhaps the extreme bludgeoning she afforded him would warrant enough of a headache that it would curb some of that guilt. He could consider it his comeuppance, and one she had delivered quite nicely, her lack of dignity pushed aside for the moment as her legs flailed about in the air and she conked him good upside the head with the nearest thing she could find. That would teach him to throw her into a wall.

Tifa stretched her arms up over her head, working the newly acquired kinks out of her back. Heavens, the man was heavy when he was aggravated. Her eyes flicked down to his crude weapon. Better hide that, she figured. After all, the last time she'd had to learn the hard way, and she was lucky enough that she had avoided it during said bludgeoning.

She bent down and gingerly took the chainsaw from his hands, somehow afraid that when she righted herself she would be staring into those empty red irises. She cradled it in her arms, eyes drifting nervously from the weapon in her hands to the man on the floor. First things first; she would hide the machine and then she would drag him back into his chamber and lock him up until dawn. When it was safe to let him out, she would do so.

It was at this point that she noticed a slight twitch in his fingers. Tifa's eyes went wide as she backed up and he began to stir around on the floor. She searched all around the place for somewhere to stash the chainsaw, but they were surrounded on all sides by dirt walls. As she saw his head begin to lull from side to side, she did the only thing she could think of and chucked the power tool far behind him and back into the dusty library with a resounding crash.

He bolted upright at the sound, and she yelped loudly in surprise, half intending to draw his attention away from the discarded weapon and half frightened to death of what might happen if she was unsuccessful. Fortunately for her, his piercing gaze was trained on her, and she backed even further into the hallway as he stood up and lunged at her. She leapt to the side and began running for the stairwell.

She had almost reached her destination when she felt herself pulled back by her shirt, nearly choked by her own collar as she was enveloped by two powerful arms. Her world spun upside down as she was slung roughly over a towering shoulder, gut wrenching at the pain that followed. He turned, heavy weight thudding against the earthen floor as he carried her back into the hallway she had come from.

She pounded on his back and kicked her legs wildly, but neither of these things did much in the way of slowing him down. He turned sharply to the left, knocking the door to his chamber wide open, and before she was able to sort out her jumbled bearings, she landed on velveteen cushions and was sealed away in darkness with an audible 'clunk'.

She immediately began to push against the lid that held her in, but she was instantly met with a jarring slam against the wood that reverberated all around her. She shrank back against the thin cushioning, but began to pound again, her knees bruising up against the flat, hard confines of the coffin. More heavy thuds followed her, and then the lid wouldn't give even an inch where before her pounding had afforded her a recurring crack of dim lighting.

And then, between the shouts and the pounding, she heard his footsteps disappear down the hallway, and she was left all alone.

As her arms and legs tired, Tifa suddenly took notice of how stifling the air inside the chamber was. The small space she was imprisoned within was thick with dust, and she was exhausted and heated from her efforts. Her hair stuck to her face and arms, and she couldn't seem to move in such a way as to escape the heavy veil it had become. Left to her own devices, she would surely run out of oxygen, and she had already used up a great deal in trying to escape. And the silence...oh, the silence was killing her with anticipation.

How she wished she had her exit materia with her! But how was she supposed to know that her boyfriend would attack her in the middle of the night and leave her to rot in his grave?

She couldn't be sure how long she'd been lying there in darkness, her head spinning, dizzy with the blood rushing through her face, when she heard the soft thumping of heavy boots making their way down the hallway. It was at this point that she began her struggle anew, knowing that stillness and quiet wouldn't save her, not caring if she fell faint from the lack of oxygen. At least she wouldn't see it coming.

It was then that she heard him revving up the chainsaw.

She pushed with all her might, stretching to fit the casket, bracing her feet against the end of the bed when all she wanted to do was curl into a tiny ball in some pitiful means of escape. She drew her arms back in the tiny space, her elbows braced against the wood as she pounded quickly with her hands, left and right, left and right, in an attempt to rattle the lid. As she continued on in blind fury, there was another hard thud atop the casket, sharp and in one spot above her. She rattled on and on inside the box, and soon she was rewarded with several more heavy thumps all around her.

Tifa burst through her wooden cage just as Hellmasker made his appearance in the doorway, heavy tomes littering the ground all around his feet. He batted the lid away with the saw as it flew at him, his lover poised and waiting for him, ready to do battle. Angry at being thwarted, he charged her, swinging wildly.

Her heart pounded in her chest as her mind raced, her eyes frantically darting about the room for anything she could use to her advantage. The two seconds it would take him to reach her seemed to pass in undeterred slow-motion, something she could only watch in horror, helpless to stop it as her time wound down to nothing. And with each passing moment, her options became scarce.

So that was how it would end, was it? Their relationship would culminate with her mutilated corpse strewn over the splintered sarcophagus of the man she loved, _and by his hands_, no less. Well, she wouldn't have that.

Seeing no other alternative, she ducked, kicking the rickety bed across the floor. It slid into his knees as he approached, and he nearly toppled over it, but found his balance to the right of the casket as she ran past him and out into the hallway. He pivoted on his heel, trampling the scattered debris as he rushed after her.

Her biggest mistake of the evening, aside from following him into the basement in the first place, was turning left upon her exit from the chamber. That, however, was nothing a toppled bookcase couldn't remedy, and she was back on track and on her way up the staircase in no time. She could hear the grind of the chain growing faint in the distance as she climbed the steps to freedom.

Once she had emerged from the basement, she set to work dragging every piece of furniture in sight to rest in front of the passageway. The hidden door lifted away from the stone hearth, so it stood to reason that if he could not push it, then he was stuck down there until she chose to let him out. But that didn't stop her from rushing to her room to grab her materia before crouching in hiding behind her closet doors.

When the rustling of clothes had subsided, her ears were filled only with a ringing that pervaded the silence, the anticipation returning to her once again as she could only wait to see whether or not he would make it out of the basement, past her blockade. And then, if he succeeded? Her shaking breath betrayed her fear, and as she failed to calm herself, she felt her confidence shriveling away.

She knew there was still a chance that, come morning, she would have a new appreciation for the phrase, 'body jewelry'. But damned if she didn't love him anyway.

†

_**10/13/2006: **In the coming chapters, I plan to get away from the whole chasing element. Thirty chapters of that will grow tiring, I believe, and there's so much fun to be had with this pairing, that I can't waste it away doing cat and mouse scenes. Now if only I could decide which idea to tackle first..._


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